The European Commission has decided that all publications that will be written in terms to publish results of public funded projects will have to be freely available on the internet. By the start of Horizon 2020 Open Access will be standard for research projects.

In a study funded by the European Commission the global shift towards making research findings available free of charge for readers was confirmed. Open access is therefore reaching the tipping point: 50% of papers published in 2011 are nowadays available for free. By making research results more accessible, open access can contribute to better and more efficient science, and to innovation in the public and private sectors. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, said: “These findings underline that open access is here to stay. Putting research results in the public sphere makes science better and strengthens our knowledge-based economy."

Open Access in Horizon 2020Research consortia in Horizon 2020 will be free to decide if they want to publish or not. This is, especially for industry and SME partners, an important point in order to protect their results. The main point is that if a research consortium is publishing, than only via Open Access.

Researchers will also be free to decide which way of Open Access they chose. Basically there are two possibilities. The green way, where authors publish in any journal and then self-archive a version of the article in a public available repository, or the golden way, where the publication is directly published in an open access journal that provides immediate open access to all of its articles. The European Commission will offer extra funding to pay fees in open access journals and mandating that scientists archive their papers in a central repository.

Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn stressed that the European Commission is promoting open access in Europe, including for the results of its own research funding: "The European taxpayer should not have to pay twice for publicly funded research. That is why we have made open access to publications the default setting for Horizon 2020, the next EU research and innovation funding programme."

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